The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations, An Analytic Study (The Little, Brown Series In Comparative Politics)

By: Sidney Verba and Gabriel A. Almond

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Synopsis: In The Civic Culture, Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba apply the modern techniques of social research to some of the classic problems of comparative politics. It is a study of the political culture of democracy. It describes the political beliefs, aspirations, emotions, and actual participation in politics of citizens in five countries--Germany, Italy, Mexico, Great Britain, and the United States. Their purpose in presenting this book is to give an understanding of the relationship between the attitudes of citizens and the functioning of modern democratic states. The Civic Culture is based on one of the largest cross-national surveys ever attempted in the field of comparative politics. Over 5,000 interviews were conducted as a basis for the book. This abridgment of The Civic Culture contains the substantive portions of the clothbound edition published by the Princeton University Press in 1963. It is essentially a condensation and no material changes have been made. Some of the data reproduced in the larger edition are not reported here. The principal difference lies in the absence of description and discussion of the methodological apparatus of the study. For a fuller discussion of the methodological problems of cross-national survey research, of the sample used in this study, and for a full report of the questionnaires used, the reader is invited to consult the clothbound edition.